50 times in a minute

Honk if you love watching the Science channel. I am amazed and a tad horrified by the course of our history.

Were you a nerd as a child? I'm one of nine. We had so little money. Our community did have a public library. I inhaled books early as a child, having little else to do. I gravitated towards the classics, to be sure, Dickens and the like. I attempted to read, let alone understand, those books in Fraktur that my Grandfather used as a teacher in the German-American community in 1915. I also found an odd place in the fanciful writings of Science Fiction.

Silverberg, Asimov, Bradbury: these authors blended well with Verne and with that new show on NBC--Star Trek.

These authors predicted so much, but I don't think they foresaw what happens 50 times a minute in 2010...

An Internet-connected computer gets, on average, 50 probes into its security per minute of connection.

I would like to get similar statistics, and their sources cited, of Internet attack traffic. I think these sorts of data make Slash n' Burn computing not only understandable, it seems to make it inevitable.

I'd also like some recommendations why I should read Dune. One of my most respected co-workers knows everything Dune. Unfortunately, my exposure is limited to the movie, which lacks a lot per others I respect.

Right now, unless you consider Gibson's works, I don't know of Sci-Fi that predicts the pervasive Hacking Underground, some (?much? of it driven by world governments) that could bot-ify our home computers so effectively.

It is the 'Wild West' nature of today's Internet and activity that is leading to so much monitoring, whether done by pervasive camera technology, Internet monitoring done by ISP's as much as governments, and businesses mining their (?your?) information each day.